Page 45 of How to Tempt a Duke

His voice was a low, sensual purr that stroked over her. Dear heavens, he was going to make her faint dead away before the hour ended if he kept up with such intimate flirtation. Even still, her mouth went dry at the suggestion behind the command.

“Your answer, if you please... Charles.” His name lingered between them and tasted sweet on her tongue, like tea cakes or marzipan.

“Yes, Eleanor.” He glanced down, as though almost shy, and regarded the journal. “My answer is yes.”

He lifted the key from where she’d set it aside absently and held it up, so they might work together again. The thin piece of metal fluttered in his grasp and giddiness charged through her at the way he too was clearly affected.

The idea that she was causing him to feel the way she did, shaking with excitement and breathlessness, served only to make every part of her tingle with awareness.

He leaned closer to her side with the key, close enough that their shoulders brushed as he moved the metal from one page to another. The warmth of his body seeped through his jacket and whispered against the exposed skin of her arm. She wanted to edge closer to him, until she was firmly pressed against his tall frame.

Eleanor turned the pages almost without seeing them, absorbed in his nearness, in the wonderful exotic spice of his scent. She hoped he was concentrating on the key, as she found herself incapable.

His gaze alternated between the book, and her. More specifically, her mouth, as though he longed to kiss her as he had the night of the masquerade.

She turned one more page and her gaze fell on a vivid painting of a woman wearing little more than scarves. A swath of red fabric was tied over her breasts and a long purple skirt was slung around her naked waist, with slits high enough to reveal her thighs. Her arm was extended upward, with her middle finger and thumb pinched together, and she stared directly out of the page with dark, fathomless eyes and long, enviable lashes.

The woman was beautiful, but the exposure of her person obscene. Far more so than any other image Eleanor had seen thus far. She would have dropped the book had Charles not grabbed it from her.

Too many questions whirled through her stunned mind for her to fix on any one in particular, and she regarded Charles with a look of confusion. Well, perhaps panicked confusion, if she were being entirely honest.

“There are things in here a lady should not see.”

She knew this, of course, but she hadn’t expected such a state of nudity.

Eleanor swallowed. “Who was she? A...a courtesan?”

“Ghawazi.” He closed the book and cast her a regretful frown. “Women who dance.”

“She’s so exposed...”

The horror began to fade and a raw curiosity pulled at Eleanor. She reached for the book. Charles did not stop her from taking it. She pulled it open to the page and stared down at the image once more—the image of a woman whose sole source of income relied on performing. Eleanor was not so foolish as to believe women such as her only danced. And yet there was no shame painted on the woman’s lovely face. There was only pleasure and satisfaction.

Eleanor considered her own ungloved hands. How ridiculous to be so overwhelmed by bare fingers when this woman was nearly naked and seemingly glad to be so.

“This is not appropriate.” Charles reached for the book.

“Nor is my being alone with you,” Eleanor countered. “Or being in a courtesan’s home, or reading through this journal, or having kissed you on the terrace, or our agreement. And yet I seem perpetually to do all the things I was taught long ago that a lady ought never to do. And I am enjoying it.”

Her body trembled with the realization of what she’d said. It had burst from her with more emotional truth than she’d permitted herself to experience in a lifetime. It was powerful, this liberation. Powerful and euphoric. And she suddenly found herself craving more.

Charles had struggled for the whole duration of his time with Eleanor. It had all been so much easier when he had been able to regard her with distaste, as the daughter of the man who had destroyed his father’s dreams.

But now, as he witnessed her determination to overcome her failings, and as she looked to him for his candor and advice, and after he’d sampled the sweetness of her lovely mouth, it was impossible to hate this woman.

What the devil had consumed him to have her call him Charles? And yet the way she said it, soft and hesitant and far lovelier than his name had ever been spoken before.

He’d been distracted by the closeness of her person to him—near enough for him to sense the heat of her, to breathe in the subtle jasmine notes of her scent—and that damnably low-cut bodice had distracted him every time he’d tried to read the letters in the key.

And after such a declaration from this woman, of her newly found enjoyment of life, he was drawn to her. He looked up and saw the passion lit up in the depths of her soul. He moved toward her as a moth to a flame, unable to stop his hands from caressing her lovely face.

He should stop. Leave. Call Lottie. Anything.

His mind raced with ways to free himself from the grip of his own temptation when Eleanor pushed onto her toes and pressed her lips boldly to his own.

He accepted the kiss, meaning it only to be a simple caress of her soft mouth on his own, something chaste and innocent. Just one and then he would back away, as he ought to. He needed to leave her for another man—one who would be a proper husband to her. And yet that first capture of her lower lip was swiftly followed by the greedy brush of his tongue.

A soft whimper sounded in the back of her throat and she sank against him, giving herself fully to the kiss, to him. His body roared with the want of her, the want to have her closer still, to remove so much more than her gloves. But she was not his. And then her lips parted and her tongue swept into his mouth.